There is a certain value to failure testing. By forcing systems to go down in a systematic way, I have been able to understand limitations in the system, as well as places where redundancy can be improved. It’s also been useful to have integration tests running during the failures.

My girlfriend ran into an issue yesterday with her online school. She currently has to download textbooks and they have some kind of custom authentication utilizing Adobe Acrobat Forms. Google Chrome sometime back made their own PDF plugin implementation which is turned on by default. We disabled this, so that whenever she downloaded a book, she could get proper use of them.

Yesterday she informed me of a conflicting issue. Periodically her school will send her letters which show up on a webpage in an object tag.

Rather than instruct her to keep turning this on and off which would be a major headache, I decided to write a UserScript. I installed TamperMonkey (equivalent to GreaseMonkey on FireFox).

I started writing the script (which assumes jQuery is on the page, which it was in this case), and wound up with the below. She can now leave Chrome PDF Viewer off and those embedded PDFs are now links she click to download.

I ran into a little difficulty today with the default behavior of the playlist in jwPlayer and the position=”over” configuration. After some simple digging into the code under PlaylistComponent.as which is in the namespace com.longtailvideo.jwplayer.view.components I found that the behavior is controlled by this snippet of code. This is for jwPlayer version 5.9.x